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What Barnes & Noble's New Nook Tablets Tell Us About Their Strategy

So Barnes & Noble’s just gone and announced a couple of new Nook e-reader tablets. The basics: There’s a 7-inch model (the Nook HD, which starts at $199) and a 9-inch model (the Nook HD+, which starts at $269). Preorders are going on now, and the devices will ship in October.

I was given a sneak peak at the new Nooks prior to their launch. While my experience was limited to a short period of hands-on tinkering in a controlled setting, here’s what I can tell you about the devices: They are comfortable to hold, light in weight, and have very bright screens that are just a hair shy of Apple’s iPad Retina display when it comes to pixel density. Appreciated upgrades, sure, but little in terms of headline-grabbing surprises (though to be fair, the iPhone 5 may have shown that the gadget world has relatively few of those up its sleeve these days).

No, the most interesting thing about the new Nooks is how clearly they illuminate the fact that Barnes & Noble and arch-nemesis Amazon view the e-reader market in very, very different ways.

The Barnes & Noble worldview: He who has the better specs wins. While meeting with B&N reps, I was told again and again how much the new Nooks’ specs rocked. Lighter than the Kindle Fire line, I was told. More pixels. Better display. Better price. You got the feeling that the Nooks’ designers took a list of the Kindle Fire’s specs, and set about besting them one by one.

But Amazon has never been a company to compete on specs. Their Kindles compete on convenience and on price. And while the new Nooks hold their own in the price department, the B&N ecosystem is nowhere near the multitentacled goliath that is Amazon. It’s on the verge of becoming a business-press cliche, but to Amazon, the Kindle is a Trojan Horse (I use the metaphor with respect, rather than as a pejorative) for getting their ecommerce, video streaming, and and ebook stores into the hands of as many Americans as possible. They don’t need to make money on the hardware, as long it helps transform folks into voracious consumers of Amazon-delivered media and products.

Next to Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s ambitions are almost quaint. They seem set on perfecting the e-reader as a piece of hardware, while paying relatively little attention to its grander implications. Perhaps this is why Barnes & Noble has also become a sort of stalking horse (sorry for all the horse metaphors) for other companies that feel threatened by the ever-expanding arms of Amazon. Let’s put it this way: It’s no coincidence that some of Barnes & Noble’s biggest retail partners for the new Nooks are the same massive retailers who recently made headlines for dropping the Kindle from their shelves (Wal-Mart and Target, I’m looking at you). Brick-and-mortar retailers feel threatened by Amazon’s not-so-secret drive to make them obsolete, and Barnes & Noble’s products serve as a buffer to total market dominance.

In other words: If Amazon wants everybody to own a Kindle so they’ll buy products through Amazon’s online store, Wal-Mart and Target surely want as many people as possible to own a Nook, simply so they don’t have a Kindle.

Yes, the great e-reader wars are beginning, and folks are taking sides.

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